CENTRAL INTELLIGENCE AGENCY

1997

Iraqi Chemical Weapons

Arranged chronologically.

At a news conference at CIA Headquarters on 9 April 1997, the CIA released
a report revealing that it had "solid information in 1986" that
chemical weapons had been stored at the Kamisiyah ammunition depot in southern
Iraq. "Despite that evidence, the agency failed to include the depot
on a list of suspected chemical-weapons sites provided to the Pentagon
before the [Gulf] war."

At a joint hearing on 16 April 1997 before the two intelligence subcommittees,
the CIA's investigator of the circumstances surrounding the destruction
of the Iraqi ammunition depot at Kamisiyah pointed to intelligence reports
both before and shortly after the Gulf War with warnings that chemical
weapons had been stored in the vicinity of that facility.

Testifying to the Senate Veteran Affairs Committee on 17 April 1997,
Former JCS Chairman Colin Powell said that neither he nor other senior
commanders at the Pentagon or in the Gulf received warnings that chemical
weapons might have been stored at the Kamisiyah ammunition depot.

Eddington, Patrick
G. Gassed in the Gulf: The Inside Story of the Pentagon-CIA Cover-Up
of the Gulf War Syndrome. Washington, DC: Insignia Publishing Company,
1997.

According to McGehee, CIABASE Update Report, Aug. 1997,
Eddington is a former CIA analyst who with his wife "tried to get
the CIA to confront the edifice of lies regarding chemical agent exposures
and their possible link to the Gulf War Syndrome.... Unearthing hundreds
of classified documents they argue that tens of thousands of American troops
had been exposed to chemical weapons."